So is the nation real or just a product of people’s imagination? The National Museum of American History is a place to search for the answer. Throughout our history we Americans have expressed ideas and raised questions about our national identity. We have declared and also debated what it means to be American, what it means to be part of a nation, and whether the nation includes all or only some of us. These questions and ideas are a vital part of our national legacy, and they come down to us from the past in the form of words, images, and, often most powerfully, artifacts. This museum, with its artifacts that capture and evoke ideas about American identity, is one place where the nation, as something defined, defended, and contested by diverse individuals and communities over time, becomes real—not in the definitive sense but in the suggestive and possible sense.
To define national identity, to say what it means to be American, is not the National Museum of American History’s responsibility. In a nation that has so many ideas about just what its identity is or is not, this approach can only get curators into trouble. And even if they did try, would anyone believe them? As curators now realize, meaning in the museum is not imposed from the top down; no matter how desperately they may wish to believe otherwise, messages are not transplanted intact from exhibit labels into visitors’ brains. Meaning in the museum is generated through the fluid and unpredictable interaction between people, objects, and ideas, a process that takes place both inside and outside the exhibit galleries. As visitors move through the museum, they create their own stories; as they make connections between the history on display and their own personal histories, they discover for themselves what it means to be American.
On the subject of national identity, the National Museum of American History’s role is not to supply the answers but to raise the questions. By bringing objects and people together, the museum creates opportunities for conversations between Americans, past and present, about the values, experiences, and beliefs that have shaped us as a nation. We can ask what it has meant to be American and then consider artifacts as possible answers. When we do, suddenly the storage drawers and exhibit cases are filled not with objects but with expressions, ideas, voices, all clamoring for an opportunity to be heard and added to the conversation. They all have different things to say, different experiences to relate, yet the fundamental message conveyed by these artifacts, by virtue of their presence in the nation’s museum, is, in the words of the poet Langston Hughes, “I, too, am America,”39 These objects demand to be included, recognized, and understood as part of the nation, as part of the American legacy: a high school girl’s patched jeans; brass water sprayers used by Chinese American laundrymen at the turn of the century; a metal toy gun demanding “Chinese Go Home”; a straw hat worn by a Puerto Rican delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1996; a jar made by a slave potter in Edgefield, South Carolina, inscribed with a poem and his name, “Dave”; a woman shipyard worker’s welding mask from World War II; an inlaid marquetry table made by a German immigrant in Wisconsin in 1860, decorated with patriotic symbols; a schoolbus window shattered by a rock thrown by whites protesting the integration of Boston public schools; a panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt. They all say the same thing: We, too, are America. Our greatest challenge—not as curators or as museumgoers but as Americans—is to imagine a nation that encompasses all of these pieces of history, a nation that is not weakened by diversity, contradiction, or conflict but defined and enlarged by it.
Chinese American woman’s dress, 1930s. Many objects collected by the National Museum of American History document how ethnic traditions are preserved, passed on, and adapted. In 1992 curators acquired a collection of artifacts used by the family of Lee B. Lok, who immigrated to the United States from China in 1881 as a young boy. The collection also includes oral history interviews with Lee’s children about their experiences growing up as Chinese Americans in New York City’s Chinatown. This embroidered satin dress, representative of 1930s Chinese styles, was worn by one of Lee’s six American-born daughters for formal occasions and holidays. (photo credit 39.1)
Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet and case, 1970s. In 1984 the National Museum of American History received a letter from a jazz fan in Webster, Texas, suggesting a new addition to its musical history collection: “the trademark diagonal trumpet of the great Dizzy Gillespie.” Curators acknowledged that the story and sound of jazz, an indigenous and vital American art form, belonged in the nation’s museum, but no concerted effort had been made to collect the instruments of famous jazz artists. In 1985 the museum acquired Gillespie’s custom-made King Silver Flair trumpet and case, and since then it has collected the memorabilia of many other jazz greats, including Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Ella Fitzgerald. (photo credit 39.2)
When objects come into the museum, they are transformed in many ways. But they also have the power to transform us. By revealing new truths and telling new stories, they can enrich, challenge, and change our understanding of American history. And in changing our view of the past, they can also change our view of ourselves. “All truths wait in all things,” wrote Walt Whitman, the poet who first described America as “a teeming nation of nations,” in 1855.40 Whitman’s message grows ever more meaningful as we contemplate our national legacy and imagine what truths still await us in the things we have saved from our nation’s past.